Design and Development

We’ve recently added support for four more currencies: JPY (Japanese Yen), INR (Indian Rupees), CHF (Swiss Francs) and NZD (New Zealand Dollars). You can now send those invoices in 10 different currencies.

In adding support for more currencies, we wanted to make sure we included currencies that are “the most popular” (whatever that means). Surprisingly, there was no definitive resource that lists out the most popular currencies by any decent metric, unlike say, languages, where the list is easy to find. We did run across this discussion which seems to indicate that this is a question that people want answered.

Eventually, we ran into the list of the top 8 most traded currencies in the foreign exchange. Not surprisingly, that list looks very similar to the list of supported currencies in Ronin. Oddly enough, the Russian Ruble and the Brazilian Real were not present, despite being high up on the top economies list.

We’re always looking to improve our offering here at Ronin, and one feature we’ve received several requests for was the ability to send estimates. Unfortunately, everyone’s daily workflow is different - drafting and sending estimates is no exception. We’ve tried to incorporate as much feedback as possible, and while we’d love to including every feature detail from numerous email threads about this feature with our customers, sometimes we have to call the shots that make sense.

So log in to your Ronin account and you’ll notice a new estimates tab. Hit the “New Estimate” button and you’re on your way. After drafting the estimate, hit “Send Estimate” and your client will receive the estimate in his or her email. The client can then respond by leaving comments, accepting or declining your estimate.

Estimates can easily be accessed from the main interface

Send estimates to clients via email

Clients can accept or decline estimates right in the web interface.

It’s all very simple (we hope) and there isn’t too much different about drafting an estimate and an invoice. We hope we’ve nailed it, but we’d love to hear any feedback.

In his book “The Design of Everyday Things” Don Norman talks about mental models as a way to describe how a system is perceived from a designer’s perspective vs. a user’s perspective. The trick in having an application that feels natural for users is to have those two perspectives be as aligned as possible.

A few weekends ago, when I was conducting usability testing for Ronin, I noticed that the subjects were often clicking the upper-left logo to go home. This is a common paradigm on the web, and it’s often very acceptable to have the upper-left logo act as a “reset”, but I was disappointed in the inefficiency of navigation. For example, for a particular user to navigate to a certain invoice, he would click home, click on the client’s name in the “Recent Clients” section and then navigate into invoices from there. He would also frequently click from one client to another using “home” as a bridge while scanning for open projects. While this didn’t seem like much work (and he pointed to me that he didn’t mind it at all), I felt that the mental model he has established for the application didn’t quite match the mental model I had in mind as the designer of the application.

One problem I identified was that he used home as an entry point because it was the only thing common to all pages - the fact that they were tied to the home page somehow. The lack of consistently available top-level navigation made it impossible for users to develop a deeper, more accessible mode of traversing through the app.

Enter tabs.

Tabs help to establish a clear mental model.

What you’ll notice if you study most applications is that there is always a highly visible interface component that helps users establish a mental model of how to interact with the application. Media players typically have play/pause/stop commands, browsers have back/forward/address-bar, and web applications typically have tabs, or some high-level navigation element.

After adding the tabs in, I found that it helps reassure users of exactly what Ronin is designed to do. It helps scope the application so there is less learning time when a user first jumps into the application. It clearly maps out the high level concepts of “Clients”, “Projects”, and “Invoices” and gives users a consistent anchor to use apart from “home”. You’ll find that these tabs have been implemented into Ronin.

We as humans continually evaluate and reason about the things we perceive. Unfortunately, being subject to so many new ideas and applications means we can only commit a large part of our learnings to standard interface elements and practices. It’s up to the application designer to keep in mind that helping nudge this process along is often means obeying age-old rules of thumb. In this case, it’s “always have visible, clear, top-level navigation.”

The mantra of the web 2.0 app is to release early, iterate often, and repeat. A big part of the “iterate often” though, can be confused for rolling on your own intuition. Even a great dog-food eating developer won’t be able to guess exactly what his or her customers want. After all, every individual is different.

This past week, the buzz in the developer world was/is Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky’s stackoverflow.com. One particular off-topic item that immediately caught my eye was the floating “Feedback” tab on the left side of the screen. I thought this was brilliant. It was an personal invitation for users of the site to express their opinions and cast their vote on suggestions for improvement. 

After clicking on this Feedback tab, I realized that this was a service provided by UserVoice. The folks at UserVoice have come up with a simple, easy-to-install widget that every web service out there can take of advantage of to quickly gather valuable user feedback. Brilliant.

Being a big fan of gathering feedback for product direction, I decided to look into it for Ronin. By the time I hit publish on this blog entry, you’ll be able to find the Feedback tab in your Ronin account. Use freely.

Ronin was built with the idea that small firms and independent contractors should have an easy to use and super-affordable invoicing and client management app in one simple service.

Before we started Ronin, we took a look at existing products out there (and there are plenty) for our own freelance use. After reviewing the options, we decided that people deserve an alternative that doesn’t cost more than the monthly cable bill. Even better, for small businesses with a small number of clients, Ronin should be free. We also wanted something that fits our work flow.

To make all of this feasible, we applied the philosophy from Getting Real into the product that we built - everything you need, nothing you don’t. We built in all the features we feel that we needed in our experience doing freelance work, but we’re always open to more ideas and welcome suggestions to improve our application to what suits our users.

We also believe that companies don’t have to aim to be the next Big Thing. Instead we want to do something small, something important, and something really well. By not trying to be everything for everyone, we can be something useful for you. We hope you enjoy our product.